2023-12-05 04:08:45
“We are celebrating 40 years of democracy and this documentary is very important because it is memory. Memory that we have to take care of in these worrying moments that we are living in, where the democracy that cost us so much to achieve is being dirty. We have lost an election, but “They haven’t defeated us. We have to remain more united than ever.” Standing on one side of the screen, the representative of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Founding Line Taty Almeida synthesized the value of the audiovisual piece that was about to be played on the first floor of Piedras 153: “Memoirs of a Mother of Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora”, a documentary directed by Claudio “Pipo” De Sautu about Taty’s life and struggle, which represents, as she herself will remember, that of all her companions who have been demanding Memory, Truth and Justice for decades.
It was the premiere of the film, a special screening for the intimate forum, with a small and close audience, among whom stood out personalities such as the Minister of Education, Jaime Perczyk, and the head of the Obra Social of the City of Buenos Aires, Alejandro Love. In the front row, two white handkerchiefs represented the Mothers: Taty’s and Clara Weinstein’s. Family and friends overflowed the improvised microcinema in the Casa de las Madres, which was recently declared a site of cultural interest by the Buenos Aires Legislature.
Narrated from interviews with Taty and her children Jorge and Fabiana, the documentary recovers different moments of her life. Her childhood in a military family, her time at public school, her work as a teacher, the birth of her three children, the marriage and divorce of Jorge Almeida. And also the last years of Alejandro, the middle child who did not make it to dinner that June 17, 1975. From there, the search, the desperate contacts with anyone who could give clues about his whereabouts, from the relatives themselves with ties in the Armed Forces, even consultations with priests and psychics. In Jorge’s heartbreaking story, for example, there is evidence of the insensitivity of the genocidaires when Ramón Camps, who was close to the family, took advantage of the situation to try to gather information about his brother’s fellow militants. “That’s when I realize. It’s these ones. These ones took him,” he recalls excitedly.
But there is also room for hope, from the meeting with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. As Taty remembers, there she will find support and organization to face the struggle, to confront the power of the dictatorship, to demand the appearance of the 30 thousand from the State. Also mentioned in this development are the democratic governments that followed one another in these 40 years of democracy, the trial of the Juntas and the Obedience of Life and Full Stop laws during the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín; its repeal and the reopening of the cases during the governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner.
The idea was born from a journalistic note in the context of the pandemic that never materialized, from which De Sautu investigated Taty’s history and compiled a large amount of documentation about his life. Material to which he would later add the interviews, in a process that required long days of work, his own capital to finance the production and the collaboration of the director Rodolfo Durán, among others. “Lito Cruz once told me not to film if I had nothing to say. And when I met Taty I really discovered that she had something to talk about. Although we have participated in the Mothers’ marches for years, many of us realized that “We are alive thanks to them. They overthrew the military,” the director reflected in dialogue with Página/12. “This is a tribute and a debt that we have with them,” he said.
It is the first auteur documentary that De Sautu makes in his career of more than 70 productions. “I have hours of material, enough to make a Taty miniseries, but I wanted to do something that penetrates. There are things that I didn’t put in the film and I didn’t want to make her say either. I entered very painful places that I wouldn’t return to. But we managed to capture the essence, the answers are there,” he said.
The 50-minute film was also a debut for the protagonist, who had only had clues about the production through the scripts that the director sent her from time to time. “It seems perfect to me that these things are done during my lifetime. Because it is not a tribute just for me, but for all the Mothers,” Taty told this newspaper. After this first performance, the historic icon is excited about holding a new screening in a larger place with “many people who love me and the ones I love.”
The documentary comes at a difficult time for human rights organizations, a few days after the inauguration of a government that has a defender of genocide as vice president and a far-right leader who recites Emilio Massera by heart as president. “We do not sow hatred like these people. We remain firm with the legal resistance, which is already being armed,” said Taty. The next few weeks will be key, and the entities that make up the table of human rights organizations are on alert for the first movements of the new Government that will take office on December 10.
The feeling that the discussion will have to be resumed on issues that seemed resolved in the recent history of the country hovered in the comments of all those present. This is how Fabiana, Taty’s daughter, understood it, who after the screening assured that this documentary “is very important for the times to come, so that girls and boys can know what happened and not forget it.”
Report: Diego Castro Romero.
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